Paul spent the next three years of his life in Damascus with the Christians. He then returned to Jerusalem and was accepted by Peter and the other Christians. Paul then went to his home city of Tarsus and spent about six years preaching in parts of Syria and Cilicia. After a final year spent at Antioch, he and Barnabas were commissioned by the Christian authorities to go to the surrounding nations and preach the Christian message. During the next 15 years Paul undertook three extensive journeys in the eastern Mediterranean region.
At the time Paul undertook his travels, that part of the world was protected by the Pax Romana. Paul had no difficulty in traveling or in communicating. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean a network of well-guarded and well-preserved roads, serviced by Roman garrisons, connected fortified and prosperous towns. A common language, Koine Greek, was spoken throughout the eastern Mediterranean and was used for all communications.
Correspondence by mail was a daily and ordinary method of communication. Furthermore, sea lanes for commerce and for passenger traffic were open between Palestine, Turkey, Greece, Italy, North Africa, and the main Greek islands. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean, scattered but well-organized communities of Jews existed in all the principal localities. Between these Jewish communities and the central authority in Jerusalem, constant communication was maintained.
The communities of Jews living outside Palestine depended upon the Palestinian authorities for the fixing of the Jewish calendar, the regulation of the Jewish year, the offering of sacrifices in the Temple, and the general authentication of doctrines, scrolls, and teachers.
Until the latter period of his life, Paul moved through these Jewish communities as a Jew. This fact has often been obscured by the later opposition between Paul and the Jews and between Christianity and Judaism. Only toward the end of his life was Paul not welcome in the synagogues of the Jewish communities. Christians in general were refused entry into synagogues only in the last 20 years of the first century. Paul's first journey, which began about 45 A.
On his second journey, Paul went overland through Turkey and then to mainland Greece, passing through Athens and returning to Palestine in the same year through Rhodes. He landed at Tyre on the shores of Palestine about 52 A. During this second journey Paul wrote his two Letters to the Thessalonians. On his third journey, Paul departed from Antioch, again traveled across Turkey, visited Ephesus and Chios, and then proceeded through Macedonia to visit mainland Greece again.
He returned home by sea from the southwest coast of Turkey to the Palestinian port of Tyre. During this third journey, Paul composed his Letter to the Galatians, his two Letters to the Corinthians, and his Letter to the Romans.
Between the beginning of his missionary journeys and his death, Paul wrote a number of letters that later became part of the Christian New Testament. Before his death he composed a total of 13 letters. A 14th letter, the Letter to the Hebrews, traditionally bearing Paul's name, is now generally considered to have been written by a disciple of Paul's.
Paul's teaching rested on three main principles: Jesus was the Son of God and the Messiah foretold by the prophets of Israel; by his death, Jesus had atoned for all men's sins and opened heaven for humanity; the Mosaic Law had, by the fact of Jesus' salvation, been abrogated and replaced by the Law of Jesus.
There was, therefore, no longer any distinction between Jew and Gentile. Paul frequently used texts from the Bible to prove his points, interpreting them according to the rabbinic method of exegesis that he had learned in Jerusalem. Two outstanding traits of Paul's writings concern the Jewish law and the Jewish people as the chosen ones of God.
His attitude on both points requires explanation. In regard to the law, Paul believed that since Christ had come the law had not been merely changed and ennobled but that it had been abrogated.
Later anti-Semitism fed on Paul's terminology and concepts in describing the Jewish law, oral and written, as merely an exercise in legalities. No trace of this negative attitude exists in Paul's writings. A persuasion is posited that all the nobility of the law and all the salvation promised to the law had been transferred to the new law of Jesus. Paul separated world history into two distinct parts: the time prior to the coming of Jesus, when the law was God's manifest way of leading men to salvation; and the time after the death of Jesus, when belief in and love of Jesus was the sole means of salvation.
In his later days, Paul probably eliminated any necessity of observing the law. In order to understand his attitude, it is well to remember that the Council of Jerusalem ca. As Paul progressed in his teachings, he came up against sterner and sterner opposition from the Jewish authorities. Doubtless, this opposition hardened Paul in his opinion that the Jewish law served only to blind the Jews and possibly the Gentiles to the truth of Jesus.
It possessed a splendid harbour, in which was concentrated the traffic of the sea which was then the highway of the nations; and as Liverpool has behind her the great towns of Lancashire, so had Ephesus behind and around her such cities as those mentioned along with her in the epistles to the churches in the book of Revelation, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea.
It was a city of vast wealth, and it was given over to every kind of pleasure, the fame of its theatres and race-course being world-wide" Stalker's Life of St. Here a "great door and effectual" was opened to the apostle. His fellow-labourers aided him in his work, carrying the gospel to Colosse and Laodicea and other places which they could reach. Very shortly before his departure from Ephesus, the apostle wrote his First Epistle to the Corinthians. Here, in consequence of the report Titus brought from Corinth, he wrote his second epistle to that church.
During his stay in this city he wrote his Epistle to the Galatians, and also the great Epistle to the Romans. While at Jerusalem, at the feast of Pentecost, he was almost murdered by a Jewish mob in the temple.
There we can imagine him pacing the ramparts on the edge of the Mediterranean, and gazing wistfully across the blue waters in the direction of Macedonia, Achaia, and Ephesus, where his spiritual children were pining for him, or perhaps encountering dangers in which they sorely needed his presence. It was a mysterious providence which thus arrested his energies and condemned the ardent worker to inactivity; yet we can now see the reason for it.
Paul was needing rest. After twenty years of incessant evangelization, he required leisure to garner the harvest of experience During these two years he wrote nothing; it was a time of internal mental activity and silent progress" Stalker's Life of St. At the end of these two years Felix was succeeded in the governorship of Palestine by Porcius Festus, before whom the apostle was again heard.
Such an appeal could not be disregarded, and Paul was at once sent on to Rome under the charge of one Julius, a centurion of the "Augustan cohort. Here he was permitted to occupy his own hired he was permitted to occupy his own hired house, under constant military custody. This privilege was accorded to him, no doubt, because he was a Roman citizen, and as such could not be put into prison without a trial. According to a Jewish tradition, it was situated on the borders of the modern Ghetto, which has been the Jewish quarters in Rome from the time of Pompey to the present day.
During this period the apostle wrote his epistles to the Colossians, Ephesians, Philippians, and to Philemon, and probably also to the Hebrews. This first imprisonment came at length to a close, Paul having been acquitted, probably because no witnesses appeared against him.
Once more he set out on his missionary labours, probably visiting western and eastern Europe and Asia Minor. The year of his release was signalized by the burning of Rome, which Nero saw fit to attribute to the Christians. A fierce persecution now broke out against the Christians. Paul was seized, and once more conveyed to Rome a prisoner. During this imprisonment he probably wrote the Second Epistle to Timothy, the last he ever wrote. In all history there is not a more startling illustration of the irony of human life than this scene of Paul at the bar of Nero.
On the judgment-seat, clad in the imperial purple, sat a man who, in a bad world, had attained the eminence of being the very worst and meanest being in it, a man stained with every crime, a man whose whole being was so steeped in every namable and unnamable vice, that body and soul of him were, as some one said at the time, nothing but a compound of mud and blood; and in the prisoner's dock stood the best man the world possessed, his hair whitened with labours for the good of men and the glory of God.
The trial ended: Paul was condemned, and delivered over to the executioner. He was led out of the city, with a crowd of the lowest rabble at his heels.
The fatal spot was reached; he knelt beside the block; the headsman's axe gleamed in the sun and fell; and the head of the apostle of the world rolled down in the dust" probably A.
Source: Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Original article from Easton's Bible Dictionary. Print this page. This situation becomes the anecdotal story that Paul uses in his letter to the Galatians to illustrate the reason why gentiles must not be circumcised. One quick question we might ask:.
Was Paul against circumcision and following the Law of Torah in a universal sense for both Jews and gentiles or just for gentiles? Does he have an exclusively gentile readership in mind when he uses negative language about ceremonial Torah practices? Paul, if we jump back into Acts, started in Antioch as his launching point the place of the controversy and eventually took several trips to various regions of the Mediterranean. These travels are how Paul was able to start so many churches, many of whom for which we have letters in the New Testament.
Depending on how one understands the dating and authorship of the Pauline letters, the writings we have that are attributed to Paul are often said to have been written during or in response to these various journeys. The letters of Paul can be broken into two basic categories: authentic letters meaning they are universally accepted as from the Apostle , and disputed letters meaning that scholars disagree about authorship.
They are as follows:. It should be noted that even Christians of various stripes contest certain letters of Paul as not being directly from his hand.
However, in the ancient world is was the practice at times to write in honor of someone by taking the pen up in their name. His disciples likely took his ideas and carried them forward after his death, in such a scenario. In the first century these would not be considered forgeries, since they were in continuity with his message an mission. But again, the point should be made that many scholars affirm all of the letters as genuinely Pauline with the important exception of the sometimes wrongly attributed letter to the Hebrews.
Paul would be arrested according to Acts 21 for having an anti-Law agenda, which from his letters we know was not true. However, if Acts is accurate, he would be arrested upon being accused of debasing the Temple Acts His arrest saved his life as Roman guards put him in chains.
After a group of Jews intended to murder Paul, he was transferred to Caearea Maritima. He would stay there as a prisoner for 2 years.
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